


Suffering, Darling

by CloudDreamer



Series: Legendary [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode: e051-057 The Suffering Game Parts 1-7, Mutilation, POV Second Person, Pre-Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Whump, Wonderland, ish, what can i say i have thoughts on lucretia and wonderland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-22 19:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19983343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Some thoughts on what happened to Lucretia in Wonderland.Also, re, the graphic violence. I wouldn't call it graphic, but there is some mildly gorey stuff if that's not your cup of tea.





	Suffering, Darling

.1: introductions

They’re twin elves, like Taako and Lup.

They’re liches, like Barry and Lup.

They are nothing like your family. 

Their touch is a cold wind against your shoulder, on your hips, on your chin as they push you into eye contact. They don’t cast shadows, and when you see them out of the corner of your eye, you see bones instead of flesh and dark black smog instead of colorful clothes.

You tell them that you know what they are, and they say what they are is fabulous. 

You laugh because you could imagine that answer coming from your brother. You remember when he did say that, a dozen years ago. When one moves, the other moves too. Like clockwork. When you’d had your family by your side, you’d moved like that.

Now you’re alone, and you exhale smoke.

Well. Not exactly. There’s a man you hired, and though you paid him to protect you, he stands behind you, letting you speak for you both. 

You don’t let your loneliness show, but they can tell something is on your mind anyway. They say they’ll get started so you can reach your treasure all the quicker. 

Their names are Edward and Lydia, and they are family. 

.2: warnings

“This is a trap,” he says.

“I know,” you say. 

“We should get out while we can.”

“That’s the thing,” you say. “I don’t think we can.”

.3 chance

It’s a roll of the dice, metaphorically, and a spin of a wheel, literally, to determine the stakes of your first challenge. They make it out to be a game. It is not a game.

You can not refuse. The penalty could be anything.

It could be your life. 

Without Davenport— you exhale as you think the name you’ve heard so many times— to fly away, without any of the others who’d learned to fly half as well as he did over the years, your death would be it. The Hunger would never come, but the Relics would still ravage the world. You’d hoped taking the memories would be enough and true, it’d limited the damage somewhat, but you still heard stories of destruction caused by what could only be their unnatural power.

(Or maybe their power is the most natural thing in all the worlds? The research suggested this theory more than the former.)

You land on hand. 

Your traveling companion also lands on hand. 

And now it’s time to play a game, against him or against one of them. 

You don’t get to chose the game. They say they don’t either, claiming it’s up to chance, but when the lever they pull sends three different symbols flying and all three land on spades, they don’t seem surprised, though they act it.

It’s a simple card game. Up to chance, they say, but you know they’ll cheat. (That’s what your twins would do.)

They ask you who you’d play against, and you stare back at them steadily without hesitation. Your traveling companion follows your lead without question.

Everything here is magic, and it’s their magic. They’re liches, like Barry and Lup, but unlike Barry and Lup, they don’t have any bonds to anything except each other. They have nothing holding them back.

But you’re one hundred and nineteen years old. They might have the home court advantage— the home planet advantage— but you’ve seen things they’d never be able to comprehend. You’ve seen dozens of worlds, and you’ve seen them all attacked, many destroyed, by a force beyond these two’s comprehension. You’re not losing.

Also, you’ve played enough card games with Taako and Lup to know how to cheat with the best of them.

You know how to win.

.4: lies

You lose anyway. 

“You cheated,” you accuse Lydia.

“Really?” She raises an eyebrow painted a shimmering perfect purple. “How?” 

She steps forward, hips to one side, and skirt swaying with colors so vibrant that they’re almost blinding. It’s too much. You pull your monochrome cloak tighter around you. 

“Lucretia?” your traveling companion asks, nervous. He lost too— badly. Worse than you did. 

“Could it be that you suspect us of playing unfairly because you did first?” Edward inquires, sickeningly sweet, and the glee in his voice is palpable. 

“And you lost anyway?” Lydia continues, the same pleasure lighting up in her eye.

“Counting cards is not cheating,” you say, steadily. They want you to cave. You will not.

“But that’s not all you did, is it?” Edward prompts.

“Lucretia?” your traveling companion says, uncertain. “You didn’t.” 

He breathes shallowly. Small puffs of smoke escape him.

“How exactly did we cheat?” Lydia is on your right and Edward your left. They touch you, and they’re deathly cold. Hands on your neck, on your hip, on your shoulder, on your collarbone. Their breath is worse. 

You don’t say anything. 

In fact, you don’t move at all. 

You’ve seen this before. You’ve been here before. Different twins, different intent, same pose. Except Taako’s perfectly polished nails weren’t digging into your skin, and Lup’s breath was always hot, too hot, sometimes boiling hot. Even as a lich, she burned. 

And they didn’t come so slowly, so predatorily, and there might’ve been mischief in their eyes but never any malice. 

It’s everything you loved about them but wrong.

You stand silent as Edward pulls your hand upwards. Your nails are rough and uneven, chewed at the tips. It’s a bad nervous having you’ve developed over the years, and you can’t seem to stop just because you know the damage won’t be undone in some months times. His are perfect, with little golden stars on teal tips.

You don’t hear her cast a spell or see her hands move. You just hear the soft thud of your right pinkie on the ground. 

You’ve felt worse. 

You’ve died before. You’ve had your body ripped apart by wild animals. You’ve been betrayed and left to slowly bleed out. You’ve been burned alive. The Hunger has perused you across all of space and time, and you rarely escaped unscathed, neither from his attacks nor the places they sent you. 

And that isn’t even touching the year you spent so very alone.

So you don’t scream. Not yet.

“Usually that’d be it,” Edward says. “But since you cheated—“

“You can’t prove that,” you interject.

“If you keep denying what you know is true, it’ll be worse for you,” she whispers in your ear, and the sound sends shivers through you, despite your best attempts. 

“Since you cheated,” Edward continues. “You don’t just lose one.”

Before you can ask what that means, you feel the necrotic energy spike near your other pinkie. This time, it doesn’t slide off, and the wound doesn’t close up. Your bone twists. Your flesh distorts. You gasp, the pain not stopping. It dulls to an ache, but as you try to move it, the sharp pain flares up again.

You’re casting a spell just to get it to stop, to go back, but Edward shushes you with a finger over your lips. Perfect hands. 

Not like Taako’s. Even on the first day, he’d had years of scars from cooking mishaps: too hot pots and pans had left burns while cutting up vegetables with knives meant there’d be times he didn’t get his fingers out of the way fast enough. Lup’s knuckles were perpetually bruised and had marks from years of bloodying her own fists or letting her flames grow too big too fast. 

It’s not them. 

“What’s lost in Wonderland can never be regained. _No healing, darling._ ”

You bristle. 

“My name is Lucretia.”

They leave you alone for a moment to breathe, collecting their penalty from your traveling companion does. 

He screams easily and loud. 

You’ve heard plenty of screams as well, and you breathe. You close your eyes. You feel empty for a moment. Just like you did on the bridge of the Starblaster when you saw a world die. It’s not you feeling the guilt. You don’t feel anything. 

And it’s quiet again. The wounds are closed, but the damage has been done. He bites his mouth closed, cutting off the rest of the sound.

You don’t see him. 

.5: challenge

You fight a battle in a room that’s built like a dark forest. The monsters are made of wood, but their claws are sharp and their bites hard. 

You win with only a scratch across your face that bleeds for too long. Your traveling companion is exhausted and covered in bruises. You patch up his legs.

“Are you sure you needed me to protect you?” he asks 

You nod. 

He protects you from yourself.

.6: rematch

You challenge them again.

You both lose again, and this time you know you’re right. There’s no beating them. They’re changing the game as it suits them. The only way to avoid a sacrifice is to play your companion and win against him, forcing him to take both instead. 

They take his right foot, and they take your good dreams. If you could say anything without fearing reproach and more twisted limbs, you’d tell them that your dreams are worth more than any body part. 

They’re the only time you get to see your family again. 

“How big is this place?”

You keep going, serving as his crutch. There’s always an end. 

.7: nightmares 

You’re hurt protecting him. 

You play a game for luck and memories, and you win but when they whisper what memory they’d take into his ears, he shakes his head, spinning the wheel again. This time, they take his leg. 

They show you your worst nightmares and challenge you to wake up from them. You see Lup wreathed in flame, accusing you of abandoning her as she burns with necrotic power, back from wherever she is now with a fury— vengeful. If you all were still looking, she yells, you could’ve found her by now. You took her brother away.

You see Taako dresses in her clothes with her umbrella pointed at you demanding that you fill the holes in his mind. He doesn’t even know who he’s missing— he doesn’t see that she’s right behind him—but there’s no way to fix it. Fisher is gone, bleeding out in ink.

You see Davenport with his words again and demanding to know what you’ve done, but you also see him small and curled into a ball, repeating his name like a prayer. You remember the words he loved to share.

You see Barry gone feral, crackling with energy he can’t control, and it’s all your fault. And he knows it’s all your fault, accusing you with words he can’t clarify. His love, once the glue that held him together, is the acid that poisons him. 

You see Merle lose faith. He belongs on this beach, he knows, so why is still missing something? Why is he so empty, and why can’t Pan fill him like he knows his god did once? He breaks his bonds as easily as he forms them and pushes the people who care for him away. 

You see Magnus alone. He has nobody to hold and nobody to protect. He is so very empty inside without you.

You see yourself.

You see the relics ravage the world. Cities turned into black glass. Golden touches. Earthquakes triggering tsunami. The lure of this damn bell. Shields splitting people in two when they stand too close. A bubble of time hiding something you can only dread. Imagination run wild. 

You see the world melt into little more than ash, all its bonds broken.

You see the Hunger.

You see John.

You see seven birds flying from a storm for a hundred years, nesting at last. You are so tired. The exhaustion in your bones feels like it could last forever, and you almost want to lay down and die here. 

And you open your eyes to see a pair of twins, alien and familiar all at once.

This bird can’t stop flying yet. You’ll carry this burden so they don’t have to, and you’ll do it for as long as you need to.

.8: chess 

You play for twenty years and something worth as much. 

Your traveling companion is tired and is running out of limbs, but he’s not as scarred as you are. His nightmares didn’t leave him shaking, didn’t send all his memories of how to play shattered.

And you lose. 

You bite your nails— the ones you still have left— and you age. Your hair turns as white as snow, and your head aches. Your prescription glasses are too weak now, which is a hard pill to swallow. Lup made them for you, and you don’t think anyone else can replicate the zooming charm she placed on the lenses with such precision and subtly. Your face wrinkles, laugh laughs etching their way around your lips. 

You say you’ll give your red robe. 

The thing’s old, patched over in dozens of places, with several parts of the stitching coming undone, and the color’s faded over the years, going from a crimson to something almost pale pink. And it’s one of the few things you still have from your home planet, so far away and so long ago.

You hesitate.

And when you hesitate, you start to beg, because you’ve lost so much already. You’ve lost your home and your family twice now. You’ve left a hundred worlds behind, abandoning so many of them to a fate that might very well be worse than death, and you’ve lived with that guilt for so long. You sent the only people who understood away just so they wouldn’t have to suffer too, but you failed and now two of them are still in pain, somewhere. 

You’re why this world is tearing itself apart now as well— you’re only trying to put it back together. You beg for the bell with everything you have, and you beg to keep this cloak. Old and tattered as it is, it’s all you have left of them.

Even still, you retreat inwards. 

You’re on the ground pleading, and Lydia pushes your chin up. Her icy touch makes you shake more, and you feel the bone beneath the skin. She breaths as you exhale, dark fog all around you, and she sucks it in. Her lips are bright red, the same color as your robe. Her teeth are all you see between them. Perfect.

There’s no gap between her front two like Taako.

She’s not missing a tooth like Lup.

“Dear, we can’t exactly break the rules. If we made an exception for you, then word would get around. It’d absolutely ruin our reputation.” 

“Besides, you’re almost there. It’d be a tragedy if gave up now.” 

You hold your robe one last time. Touching it is feeling the sand between your toes as you paint Lup on the beach and hearing the soft crinkle of the pages of Merle’s book. It is tasting one of Taako’s home cooked meals and watching a new world come into view with Davenport. It is your second home. 

And it is gone.

.9: games 

It is only your traveling companion that keeps you from your final death in the next challenge. 

He pulls you out of the way of something falling only to land under it instead. He bleeds, and you can’t process seeing the red. He begs for you to save him, which you do, but only after he calls your name five times. 

This isn’t bad luck. This is your fault. 

You say you’re sorry, but you don’t look him in the eye. If you did, you’d see his suffering and pain, and you can’t afford to acknowledge him. If you do, the guilt will crush you. It will make you unable to proceed. 

To betray him.

.10: continue

You win the game, and he loses more pieces of his body. 

“You’re almost there, darlings,” the liches say, sickeningly sweet as always. Their voices are too high, and they hurt your ears.

They lie. 

There’s no escape from Wonderland. This is an endless loop, and you will never be free. Even if you did leave this physical hell, it’s left its mark on you. Your pinkie screams every time you so much as touch it.

Blood drips down your head from a nasty cut. You think you’ve got a concussion. Or maybe this is just your guilt and grief overpowering you.

Maybe you deserve this.

.11: traitor

You see the words escape, and you think it’s a trick. You don’t care. You drag your way towards it, pulling him along with you, because if there’s a remote chance you can get out, you’ll treat it as certainty. 

You are so tired. 

You want your family. 

You need Magnus’s arms to hold you. You need Lup’s encouraging words. You need to tell everything to Merle, and you need him to nod his small head. You need Davenport’s japes and jokes. You need Taako’s confidence. You need Barry’s love, unconditionally. 

But all you have is your own two feet, and that’s all you can rely on.

Two options: to trust or to forsake.

If you both trust, you can both leave— but with a consequence.

If you both forsake, neither can leave, but that’ll be it. 

If you forsake but he trusts, you can leave free without any conditions, but he’ll be trapped forever— with a consequence.

If you trust but he forsakes, you’ll be trapped forever— with a consequence.

Your traveling companion says he believes in you, but he’s a fool to do. You’ve watched worlds burn. You’ve betrayed the people you love the most in the world. And you will not die here.

You breathe the air of the Felicity Wilds, and it is so fresh. The sky is blue, and the one sun on this planet shines bright. You feel the warmth on your newly wrinkled skin, and you cannot wrap yourself in the soft robes you’d carried for a hundred years. They are gone forever, left in Wonderland with a piece of you that you can never reclaim. 

It was not sacrificed. It was not wagered. It was stolen by monsters

.12: re

Three of your family stand in front of you, expectantly, and one is just out of reach. They think this will be another mission, dangerous and with plenty of room for collateral damage

You can’t look any of them in the eye, and you can’t look at Taako at all. He still has Lup’s umbra staff with him, holding it in those hands with those polished nails— colored cyan with a yellow star on his middle finger. He’d found bracelets inside a jewelry box and extra clothes in the drawers of the room you’d given him after Goldcliff, and almost all of the magical items in Leon’s gashapon that’d dropped for him were things she’d made. 

He’s one half of a whole without her and doesn’t even know it.

You’ve done your best to give her back in pieces, holding back as best as you could in case they’d trigger those memories and failing to resist most of the time, but it’s not enough. You see it in how he moves everyday, how easily he leans into any partner that comes his way and how he treats Angus.

You can’t see him now, though.

All you can see is the shadow of another pair of twins.

Those half reactions where he expects her without knowing it are a fresh sort of pain as you describe Wonderland for the first time in so long. There’s a knot in your chest that tightens as you describe it, one that chokes you as you send them on what feels like a suicide mission.

These missions have all been dangerous, but they were distant. You’d trusted these three to handle worse odds before, and they’d (almost) always came through. By the end of your century, there was almost nothing they couldn’t handle. 

There was almost nothing you couldn’t handle either. 

You’re strong enough to survive a hostile planet alone, to face down an eldritch abomination, and to build everything about the Bureau from _nothing._ From that nothing, you’ve collected six of the seven artifacts, and once this is done, you’ll defeat the Hunger once and for all. 

But. 

But in between now and then, you’re sending your family into the depths of hell. 

Once they’re gone, you sink into your chair and rest your head in your palms. One of the fingers in your glove is empty, taken all those years ago, and one of them is twisted past recognition. 

You should’ve told them more, but you know that if you’d kept them here any longer, you’d have begged them to stay.


End file.
